


abandonment

by julamei



Series: the lucy chronicles [5]
Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-08-15 18:26:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8068081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julamei/pseuds/julamei
Summary: because it was not a good time for lucy for everything to fall apart.





	

“No.” The word chokes her after lodging in her throat like a burning ball of incredulity and anger until it bursts from her lips. A crippling numbness creeps out from the bruised, splintered region of her heart. She feels completely crushed and her knees buckle, sending her backside heavily down to meet the mattress behind her. Following in the silent wake of her shock, sorrow whips through her like a sandstorm and covers everything in a fine, prickling layer of anguish.

 _I can’t believe he’d do this. I can’t believe he’d be so self—_ “No,” her voice rings out again and cuts off her train of thought. She imagines the broken look on Natsu’s face and the shattered sound of his voice as he called for his dying father. _He’s so hurt, he can’t see what he’s doing, he can’t think straight._ Lucy feels tears leak past her lashes and blur the letter in her hands. _He’s been talking about Igneel since the moment I met him – who knows how much that hope drove him?_ Natsu’s bright, all-encompassing grin flashes in her mind. _How much of him was held together by that hope? And now that Igneel’s gone for good and he knows it, he saw it, he was there to hear and see him…_  

_He needs to heal, and this is what he thinks is best – what he thinks will make things better._

Lucy’s fists clench in frustration before she catches herself and sets the note down on the bed beside her. “Lucy,” she says to herself aloud to make them more real, “he doesn’t know how this will hurt you.” Her reassurances don’t even begin to treat the wound that is his abandonment. _So soon after Aquarius…_ And Lucy lets go, her head falling into her hands, her eyes closing, tense with grief, and sobs with all the strength of her pain. Her mother, her father, her oldest friend, and now Natsu.

* * *

Losing Aquarius was like losing her mother all over again. Aquarius had been with her mother, and Lucy remembered how it felt to summon her for the first time on her own. Her mother had been so proud, lavishing hugs, kisses, and words of triumph on her. She didn’t understand at the time the look of hatred on Aquarius’ face, but in time Lucy grew to understand that her mother’s love for her made Aquarius seethe with jealousy. She and Aquarius would never get along, but Lucy admired the spirit’s strength and beauty and the conviction of her emotions. 

And Aquarius reminded her of her mother – her first try at magic, her link to her power, her childhood nurtured by Layla’s loving smile – even Aquarius’ loathing of her felt comforting and familiar. In the end, in the last moment together, she’d seen Aquarius look at her with affection and pride… And whether she ever really let herself feel it, she’d always thought of Aquarius as an older sister.

Losing her felt like losing yet another tie to her mother, making her feel untethered and odd, as if she weren’t herself. Her mother, her love for her mother, and her mother’s love for her had always been a central component of Lucy’s identity, but now… They’d had to move her original grave, Lucy could no longer visit the house where they had lived together, and now even her father had passed. Besides a few keepsakes, her keys, and her letters, Lucy had no physical connections to her mother. There was no one else in her life anymore who’d been there with her and mother together, who’d known them both at the same time.

The thought shocks Lucy so much that her hands slowly release her hair. _There is no longer anyone in my life who’s been there with both me and my mother_ , she repeats. Her mind gallops back, trying to refute this statement, but although Capricorn had been one of her mother’s celestial spirits, Lucy had never met him. _Cancer_? Lucy takes a deep breath and tries to think back to when she first met Cancer… _I can’t remember!_ She’s summoned him so many times for such frivolous things; they never talk about her mother, either. Did she have any memories of him, her mother, and herself? Her hands grip the sides of her head.

A laugh, hysterical and reckless, bubbles out of her. What is she thinking? Of course Cancer had been there – Layla indulged and spoiled her only child and daughter, but she did pamper herself on occasion as well.  Lucy had been young when her mother and father had done most of their socializing, but she remembered sitting on a couch while Cancer fixed her mother’s hair a couple times. To Lucy’s small, six- and seven-year-old eyes, her mother had been the epitome of beauty, femininity, and grace, especially after Cancer’s treatment. She’d gone to one event with her parents when she’d been eight, and enjoyed getting ready together with her mother (and Cancer!), but her mother’s health had been failing, and that had been the last ball she would attend.

The year after her death, when Lucy was eleven, Cancer would do her hair for her in front of the same vanity mirror that her mother had sat at, and she would attend her first ball alone with her father. It had not been a good night.

Hugging Aquarius’ broken key to her chest – she has no idea when she laid down on the bed or when she’d taken it out of her pouch – her body bends further in on itself and she continues to cry. For her mother, her father, her lost childhood, Aquarius’ jealousy, and Natsu’s pain. She feels it all and gives herself this time to feel it, so that tomorrow she can begin to build herself up again, brick by broken brick, but never turning her back to her past or her pain or her friends’ pain.

Lucy falls asleep in her clothes and wakes up to stiff muscles, sticky hair, swollen eyes, and the day of Fairy Tail’s disbandment. But that’s okay, because she’s strong enough. Natsu has his battles to fight, her guild members have their identities to discover and explore, and she will be her own family until Natsu and Happy return. She has the rest of her celestial spirits, after all, and they have never been merely tools to her.


End file.
